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Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist Other Books by Siobhan Chapman Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist Other books by Siobhan Chapman ACCENT IN CONTEXT PHILOSOPHY FOR LINGUISTS Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist Siobhan Chapman © Siobhan Chapman 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-0297-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-20693-9 ISBN 978-0-230-00585-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978023005853 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chapman, Siobhan, 1968– Paul Grice, philosopher and linguist / Siobhan Chapman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. Grice, H. P. (H. Paul) I. Title. B1641.G484C48 2005 192–dc22 2004051259 10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents Acknowledgements vi Preface vii 1 The Skilful Heretic 1 2 Philosophical Influences 10 3 Post-War Oxford 31 4 Meaning 61 5 Logic and Conversation 85 6 American Formalism 114 7 Philosophical Psychology 138 8 Metaphysics and Value 157 9 Gricean Pragmatics 185 Notes 217 Bibliography 232 Index 243 v Acknowledgements A number of people have made this book possible by giving generously of their time to talk about Paul Grice, his life and his work, whether by letter, by e-mail or in person. I would therefore like to thank the fol- lowing, in an order that is simply alphabetical, and in the hope that I have not omitted anyone who should be thanked: Professor Judith Baker; the staff at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, in particular David Farrell; Tom Gover of the Old Cliftonian Society; Kathleen Grice; Adam Hodgkin; Professor Robin Lakoff; The Rossallian Club; Michael Stansfield, college archivist at Corpus Christi and Merton colleges; Professor Sir Peter Strawson; Professor Richard Warner. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Grice for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and to quote from manuscript material; and to the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which gave permission to quote from their manuscript holdings. For my parents, Raymond and Patricia vi Preface There is an inherent tension in writing about Paul Grice because two separate academic disciplines lay claim to his work, and do so with jus- tification. Those who know him as a philosopher may not be aware of the full significance of his role in the development of present day linguistics, while those whose interest in him originates from within linguistics may be unfamiliar with the philosophical questions that are integral to his work. Grice would not have considered himself to be any- thing other than a philosopher, so the title of this book might seem odd or even provocative. But I chose it in order to reflect the profound influ- ence he has had on a discipline other than his own. Grice’s work is of interest to philosophers and to linguists alike. I myself belong to the second group. My first encounter with Grice’s work was when I was introduced to his theory of conversation as a student, and was struck by the ambition and elegance of his proposed solution to a range of linguistic problems, as well as by the questions and difficulties it raised. I have since been pleased to recognise just these reactions to the theory in many of my own students. As I read more of Grice’s work, I became intrigued by the question as to whether there was a unity to be found in his thought that would incorporate the familiar work on conversation into a larger and more significant philo- sophical picture. This book is my attempt to answer that question. I cer- tainly hope that it will be of interest to readers from both philosophical and linguistic backgrounds, with the following words of caution to the former. Grice’s work draws on a range of previous writings that often go unac- knowledged, presumably because he assumed that his audience would be aware of its philosophical pedigree. The questions he is addressing can be less familiar to linguists, so on a number of occasions I have offered an overview of the history of an idea or an exegesis of a work. I run the risk that these sections may appear to be superficial, or alter- natively to be labouring the obvious, to readers well versed in philoso- phy, but I have offered the degree of detail necessary to enable those unfamiliar with the relevant background to follow Grice’s arguments and appreciate the nature of his contribution. Further, my intention in vii viii Preface these sections is to sketch the relevant history of a philosophical debate, rather that to offer either a critique of or my own contribution to that debate. I can only ask for tolerance of these aspects of my book from readers already familiar with the relevant areas of philosophy. 1 The Skilful Heretic In 1986 Oxford University Press published a volume of essays drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, who was then 73. It was not formally described as a Festschrift, but Grice’s name was concealed as an acronym of the title, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, and many of those who contributed to the volume took the opportunity of paying tribute to his work and influence. Among these, Gordon Baker revealed that what he admired most was Grice’s ‘skilful advocacy of heresies’.1 In a similar vein, Grice’s colleague Richard Grandy once introduced him to an audience with the comment that he could always be relied on to rally to ‘the defence of the underdogma’.2 Given Grice’s conventional academic career together with his current status in philosophy and, particularly, in linguistics, these accolades may seem surprising. His entire working life was spent in the prestigious universities of Oxford and Berkeley, making him very much an estab- lishment figure. Much of his philosophy of language, particularly his theory of conversational implicature, has for a number of decades played a central role in debates about the relationship between seman- tics and pragmatics, or meaning as a formal linguistic property and meaning as a process taking place in contexts and involving speakers and hearers. But the canonical status of Grice’s ideas masks their uncon- ventional and even controversial beginnings. As Baker himself ob- serves, Grice’s heresies have tended to be transformed by success into orthodoxies. In fact, Grice’s work was often characterised by the challenges it posed to accepted wisdom, and by the novel approaches it proposed to estab- lished philosophical issues. The theory of conversational implicature is a good example. It is often summarised as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the fact, familiar to common sense, that 1 2 Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist what people literally say and what they actually mean can often be quite different matters. In particular, the theory is concerned with some apparent discrepancies between classical logic and natural language. More generally, it addresses the question of whether the meaning of everyday language is best explained in terms of formal linguistic rules, or in terms of the vagaries and variables of human communication. Grice’s theory developed against the background of a sharp distinction of approaches to these issues. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who saw logic as the appropriate apparatus for explaining meaning, dismissed the differences displayed by natural language as examples of its inherent imperfection. Everyday language was just too messy and imprecise to form an appropriate topic for philosophical inquiry. The opposing view is perhaps best summed up by the slogan from Wittgenstein’s later work that ‘meaning is use’.3 Philosophers from this school of thought argued that if natural language diverges from logical meaning, this is simply because logic is not the appropriate philosophi- cal tool for explaining language. Meaning in language is an important area of study in its own right, but can be considered only in connec- tion with the variety of ways in which language is used by speakers. Grice’s approach to this debate was to argue that both views were wrong-headed. He proposed to think outside the standard disjunction of positions. Logic cannot give an adequate account of natural language, but nor is language simply a multifarious collection of uses, unamenable to logical analysis. Rather, logic can explain much, but not all, of the meaning of certain natural language expressions. More generally, formal semantic rules play a vital part in explaining meaning in everyday lan- guage, but they do not do the whole job.
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